There's wrong and there's disastrously wrong

By Brian Clegg

The other day, I was reading the late Christopher Booker’s ridiculously long The Seven Basic Plots and came on a spot of science writing that made me gasp in its comprehensive inaccuracy. He is looking at creation myths, giving us three versions, the final being the Big Bang theory, which he tells us ‘is still “telling a story”, and in this sense we can look at it just as we would look at any other type of story.

Now, I have no problem at all with that statement. A scientific theory of any kind is definitely a form of narrative – and since cosmology tends to be at the more speculative end of science, because you can hardly replicate the experiment, it is particularly apt to think of it in this way. But here’s the story that Booker tells us:

‘The “Big Bang” theory of the creation of the universe suggests that in the beginning there was an agglomeration of hydrogen atoms, so tightly compressed together that it was only millimetres across and of almost infinite mass. This constituted, as it were, a ‘Universal Egg’ which contained the potential for all that was to follow. At a certain point, somewhere around 15 billion years ago, this ‘Egg’ exploded, with such force that electrons jumped from one nucleus to another, creating the atoms of all the other elements. These were the atoms which still constitute the physical universe and everything in it, including ourselves.’

Umm. The book was published in 2004, when 13.7 billion years was perhaps more popular than the current 13.8 billion years for the age of the universe – but no one was thinking 15 billion (hey, what’s over a billion years between friends?). However, the excruciatingly bad part is the idea that we started with hydrogen atoms, and all the other elements were created in the Big Bang when ‘electrons jumped from one nucleus to another.’

If Booker had bothered to read any basic popular science title at the time, he would surely not have been able to write such tripe. It did occur to me briefly that this was a joke on his part – assuming his readers would be ignorant of science, given the old C. P. Snow ‘two cultures’ divide (see this), he made up his Big Bang story to demonstrate how much it was just a myth. But I’m afraid it’s almost certainly the case that he simply couldn’t be bothered to check his facts, as this was science as opposed to his heavily researched literary text.

On the subject of story plots the book is interesting, if far too long. But, really? To use two of his basic plots, this bit of science writing veers between comedy and tragedy.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.